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The Romantic Economist - A close-up

Chapter eight, ‘Imagination and creativity in markets’, begins by analysing the nature of imagination and its relationship to reason. Imagination receives strangely little attention in most of modern academia in...

Richard Bronk

Barbarians to Angels - A close-up

A browsing reader might find the chapters on craft production and trade most revealing. The archaeology shows us that even small communities during the so-called Dark Ages belonged to complex...

Peter S. Wells

Political Affect - In a nutshell

In Political Affect I address human nature as bio-cultural. Each one of us is a “body politic” that connects the social and the somatic. I avoid the extremes of social...

John Protevi

Natural Interests - A close-up

I would hope that a reader browsing in a bookstore would first look at the range of subjects explored in the book’s seven chapters and look more closely at one...

Caroline Ford

The Known Citizen - A close-up

A reader who picked up The Known Citizen and opened it at random might come across social outrage over candid photographs in the late nineteenth century, prompting a spate of...

Sarah E. Igo

The Ecological Thought - A close-up

If I were yelling at someone from a fast moving train and had only one chance to say one thing about my book before they went out of earshot, I...

Timothy Morton

On the Judgment of History - In a nutshell

We hear a lot these days about the judgment of history. In the face of political conflict, corruption, and sheer lies, we sometimes comfort ourselves by saying that “history” will...

Joan Wallach Scott

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair - In a nutshell

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident...

Moshik Temkin

My Life as a Spy - A close-up

I tried to finesse this question by putting the most important things at the beginning: a surveillance photo of myself in my underwear, a preface beginning with the sentence I...

Katherine Verdery

To Serve God and Wal-Mart - In a nutshell

For more than a generation, the conservative counterrevolution in America blurred the distinction between the invisible hand of the market and the all-powerful hand of God. In the “culture wars”...

Bethany Moreton

Beautiful Monsters - The wide angle

The book moves fluidly, even unexpectedly, among chronological periods, genres, types of media, and among ways in which the “classic” has been defined since the second century C.E. All of...

Michael Long

Gods and Robots - A close-up

I picture someone in a bookstore becoming intrigued by the 75 illustrations, especially the 14 color plates showing the stunning skills of fifth-century BC artists. Ancient coins depict the bronze...

Adrienne Mayor

The Last Utopia - The wide angle

I originally got started on this topic as a young idealist then as a neophyte teacher. While in law school, I interned in the United States government, out of the...

Samuel Moyn

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty - In a nutshell

The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was an internationally celebrated event, and was also the occasion for numerous proclamations, across the political spectrum, of a dawning unbordered world. Yet,...

Wendy Brown

Bad for Democracy - A close-up

The-president-as-superhero myth promises all the democracy with none of the work. As such it teaches citizens to admire rule by strong individuals and to abjure the messy workings—disagreement, slow debates,...

Dana Nelson

A Dream Interpreted within a Dream - The wide angle

While I was doing field research during the 1990s for an earlier book, Healthy Democracies, I came across a great deal of government and industry documents focused on the imperatives...

Elliot R. Wolfson

One Day in the Life of the English Language - In a nutshell

This book is a grammar handbook. It covers parts of speech, diction, and punctuation. Most grammar handbooks function as reference books, and lay out “Standard Written English” as if it...

Frank L. Cioffi

Success and Suppression - The wide angle

There are many forgotten heritages in Western history, but the issue of Arabic influence is particularly contested because the heritage has its roots in a culture that suffers from Western...

Dag Nikolaus Hasse

Global Lives - A close-up

The nature of this book is that it is full of close-ups. It is made of the details of people’s lives, and the ways that they shaped and were shaped...

Miles Ogborn

Listed - A close-up

In Listed, I examined a few high-profile species where there appeared to be a clear conflict between conservation and economics: the red-cockaded woodpecker that knocked down a city, a pair...

Joe Roman

Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance - A close-up

I use the example of Copernicus, who literally picked up from Arabic texts almost all of the mathematical theorems he needed for the construction of his astronomy; these theorems were...

George Saliba

More - The wide angle

People have wrestled with population and the control of reproduction for thousands of years. Yet both of these topics are always sensitive and hence mostly marginalized in literature and public...

Robert Engelman

The Conservative Turn - A close-up

The emotional center of this book lies in its epilogue. Here the style of writing changes, it slows down and becomes less analytical and more impressionistic. The epilogue sketches a...

Michael Kimmage

Bombshell - The wide angle

The book relates to the changing nature of terrorism and how different groups are either being forced or recruited into these deadly organizations.I address several underlying theories about the nature...

Mia Bloom

The Apartment Plot - The wide angle

On the one hand, this book addresses the well-known literature on Orientalism, and argues that singing Turks were not understood as simply exotic “others” on the European stage. On the...

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

The Pecking Order - The wide angle

One way to situate the book is simply to see it as contributing to ongoing philosophical debates about particular social phenomena, such as the state, the workplace, discrimination, and corruption....

Niko Kolodny

The Ghosts of Mark Twain - The wide angle

Many of us have been shocked by the brazen denials and revisions of racial and racist history that have been occurring all over the country. However, this whitewashing of American culture is nothing new. In fact, Toni Morrison suggests, in her seminal book on the intersections of race and metaphor in America, Playing in the Dark

Ann M. Ryan

Keeping Family Secrets - A close-up

Each of the chapters begins with a case study, the first-person story of an individual who held, or discovered, a family secret. A close friend of mine browsed through the...

Margaret K. Nelson

Into the Extreme - A close-up

I hope the reader will thumb through the book and check out the images and illustrations. U.S. human spaceflight is both a civil and a military activity, which means that...

Valerie Olson

The Tibetan Book of the Dead - The wide angle

As someone who went to college in the 1970s and was interested in “Eastern Philosophy” as it used to be called, I read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and...

Donald S. Lopez Jr.

2122 Micro-Interviews